With the glittering parades, towering floats and sultry samba postponed by the omicron variant, Brazil will have a carnival week without much carnival this year — bad news for a tourism industry already battered by the pandemic. In a world without Covid-19, this would have been the week a deluge of tourists — more than 2.1 million in 2020 — descended on Rio de Janeiro for a free-for-all of street parties and spectacular, all-night parades.
Instead, industry experts predict Rio and other tourist destinations to be relatively low-key, with a smaller number of visitors — mainly Brazilians traveling domestically. That is adding to the agony of a tourism industry only just starting to recover from near-collapse in 2020. —AFP
